Passing judgment on everything

One year (and a bit) on

The fact that I haven’t blogged in a long while is testament to how all-consuming my new teaching life has been. When I haven’t been teaching – or doing something teaching related – I’ve been making up for it letting my hair down with friends, or making cupcakes with my niece. But there never seems to be enough time to do other things, and I’m not yet at the stage when I could confidently say I have a healthy work/life balance.

There’s always some meeting to get to, something to file/log/mark, someone to ask questions of or answer questions to, and of course the students are always asking “What are we doing next?”.

I’m one full term (or half term in old money) in to being a ‘real’ teacher now. Yes, I am exhausted, and yes, I underestimated quite how hard this would be. But something keeps me going in spite of the perpetual challenge and the ups and downs. Something stops me from throwing in the towel even when I’ve had a day which went belly up and I’ve hated myself for doing/saying something stupid.

My teaching skills leave much to be desired and I’d be surprised if Ofsted judged me fit to teach at all some days! I feel the constant pressure from the ‘data’ and ‘progress’, and every so often I crumple under the overbearing weight of responsibility I feel for their futures. Never more so than this week when I sat with my HoD and decided which of our Year 12 retakers would resit their Controlled Assessments. Decisions were based on what they had achieved so far and whether I thought they would a) resit 5 pieces of work and b) succeed at it. I ended up putting all of them back in the pot. I didn’t want my judgment to limit their achievement, it just didn’t seem fair. They’ll hate me for it, I know this, but the alternative was telling them we didn’t think they were good enough to secure their required C and as such they would not be allowed to continue with their Post-16 endeavours.

I sat down to write this blog with every intention of writing something pithy and poignant but instead it’s just a virtual sigh. I hope to make this more regular, and stick to topics and themes a bit more, but for now, this is me, NQT blogger back in the fold. Look forward to recording some of the most exciting days of life right here.